: Mon Jan 05, 2009 1:23 pm
Optimism is a great thing to have, even better if it's blind but I just cannot be positive about the coming season. Some people are talking as if our squad last year was full of quality and capable of greatness before the injuries hit. It wasn't ! It was a squad that still lacked quality in crucial areas and still had it's inadequacies that had not been addressed season after season.
Had we gone through the season with average injuries, IMO we would have finished around 6th or 7th and many of the pundits had us exactly there in the pre-season build up.
Since then we have some key players back like Horne and Whiting, fit and raring to go (hopefully) but we still lack real quality in crucial areas and our squad just doesn't match up when compared to the better squads in SL.
Last season we lacked a big no-nonsense prop, we still haven't got one and now we've lost our best one to add to that.
Last season we had serious doubts about our halfbacks (especially SH) and serious worries about the prospect of Tommmy Lee finding his way back into the halves. Nothing has changed there.
Last season we lacked pace and strike in the backline and although IMO Calderwood is a good signing, we still have a very worring gap in the centre spot inside him.
Crocker will hopefully turn out to be a fantastic signing but for me, the backrow wasn't really an area that needed much attention. In an ideal world, I would have liked to see Radford somehow encouraged to go elsewhere and replaced with a second rower more in the Lee Gilmour mould.
In general our squad doesn't look any stronger to me but I think we should have a stronger starting 17 most weeks and therefore should finish a little higher up the table. Before any aspirations of top two though, I think we need to see maybe 5 or 6 players out and 4 or 5 coming the other way.
Awsome.
